


Even the Night

by tackytiger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blow Jobs, Brief Mention of Parental Violence, Brief mention of being outed, Drinking, Fireworks, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Masturbation, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, POV First Person, Sensory Deprivation, Smoking, Taste, TasteofSmut 2020, Temporary Blindness, Touch, recreational potions use, sight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:27:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25166191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tackytiger/pseuds/tackytiger
Summary: I'm so bad at thisTwo boys meet on a rooftopRead and find out moreFeaturing lots of cigarettes, a Midsummer sky, close encounters in a bath, and plenty of fireworks.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 45
Kudos: 312
Collections: Taste of Smut Fest





	Even the Night

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the incomparable gang for all the help with this: [Maesterchill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaesterChill/pseuds/MaesterChill) [m0stlyvoid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/M0stlyVoid/pseuds/M0stlyVoid) [shealwaysreads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onereader/pseuds/shealwaysreads)
> 
> And to Maester for the haiku summary idea!
> 
> And huge thanks to the wonderful ToS mods for all their work in setting up and running this fest.

# Draco

Potter’s on the roof again, face serene and uptilted to the sky under the gathering chaos of the clouds. It’s dark up here, despite the lights of London stretching out ahead of us, but I’d know Potter anywhere, even as little more than a denser shadow against the unfolding night.

I suppose I can’t be pissed off at him for being here, really, even though it’s always felt like _my_ rooftop. He did save the world, after all, and with everything he has to put up with at work , and with the press, and just _people_ in general, he deserves this little slice of quiet.

Before Potter started coming out here, I was the only one who ever used it. But this is the fourth time now that he’s followed me out, and I’m starting to think it’s intentional, even though usually he doesn’t speak to me, just smokes and smiles at the sky in silence. It’s not easy to get out here, because it means climbing through the small window of the bathroom in Ginny and Luna's flat. That’s tricky because when both Potter and I are here at the same time it’s usually for a party, so we’re almost always at least a bit drunk. He’s limber though, Potter is, and sometimes I don’t even hear him dropping from the windowsill; I’d hardly know he’s here except for the whisper of _Incendio_ and the jumping shadow of the flame across his skin as he lights up.

I love it out here, though, and for some reason him being here doesn’t make it any less lovely. It should do, I suppose, because we’re not friends, not by a long shot. I don’t really know how we could ever be, when the bridge of his nose still leans slightly off-centre after that bad break, and I still have a ruined left forearm and a lifetime of shame ahead of me. 

And sometimes, when he’s really drunk, I see his eyes follow the arc of the scars on my throat. He tracks them to where they disappear below the collar of my t-shirt, and there’s a vicious sort of hunger in the way he looks at them, like he doesn’t regret putting them there in the least. And why should he, I suppose. I deserved it—he knows it, I know it, everyone knows it. 

But I’ve learned my lesson since then, and he knows that too, I think. He’s always friendly—kind, even—and when the _Prophet_ outed me, and Rohit (my favourite Hufflepuff, not that I’d ever tell _him_ that) had to heal up the cracked rib my father gave me before I managed to Apparate out of the Manor, Luna told me that Potter stormed round to the _Prophet_ offices and threatened to burn them down. I can imagine him doing it, too. He’s all fire these days, like coming back to life has lit a touchpaper in him. 

I feel the rain start just as I light up, just a gentle dappling of mist at first, though it quickly turns into a proper downpour—solid sheets of that particularly _wet_ December rain that reminds me so much of Wiltshire, and makes me cold right down to my bones.

Potter runs through it towards me—well, towards the overhang of the roof—and I want to roll my eyes at how cheesy the whole thing is; him, soaked through already, dodging puddles, laughing up at the stars. I don’t, though, because there’s something too vulnerable there—that foolish, simple delight in his freedom—that makes me quiet, and a bit kinder than I usually am. Instead, I just watch him, stupidly bright-eyed, the shifting sheen of him in the bounceback of city lights. He’s having fun, I realise; after all these years, he’s finally having fun. He reaches me with a squelch, and without thinking I pass him the half-smoked cigarette, which he takes without any sign of surprise. 

“Aren’t you cold, Malfoy?” he asks, hauling his inadequate jacket tighter around himself, and when I shrug at him he puts one finger to my chest and plucks at the thinning patch in the yarn of my old jumper. 

And for lack of anything else to talk about, I tell him that where I grew up, it was often colder inside than out, and how in the winter sometimes the walls of the little-used rooms used to weep with condensation, and how all my old clothes are laced with Warming Weave. I don’t miss the Manor, I tell him—I _don’t_ —but sometimes the heat and light of these inner-city boxy flats make me feel like I’m going to shake out of my skin.

He nods. “I need fresh air too, sometimes,” he says, then sucks deep on the stub of the cigarette, which makes me laugh. When he laughs back, smoke shivers out of him into the night around us. At some point, the rain has stopped.

* * *

# Harry

All around us there’s nothing but dust. 

The air shimmers with it, stationary with heat, and when I wake in the night, sheets damp with sweat and coiled around my restless body, I can smell the dry burn of a London summer in the back of my nose. Everything feels like a dream, at the moment—I’m between jobs, and the days are long and syrup-slow, and sometimes I fall asleep in the patches of sun that move across the floor of my little bedsit, like a cat might.

Malfoy is sitting across from me on the rooftop, and even though it’s nearly ten o’clock at night, the gilded sky is still burning with the fury of the late summer sunset. We’re both very drunk.

“...and it’s not as though we’re at school anymore, but he really couldn’t _be_ more of a Hufflepuff, could he?” Malfoy laughs. He’s been telling me some interminable story about Rohit, who Malfoy loves almost more than he loves anyone else. Rohit's on his mind, because today Rohit went to live with his Muggle boyfriend. He moved out of the flat just a few hours ago, in fact; out of the very flat we've just escaped from to get some fresh air, the one Rohit has shared with Ginny and Luna since we left Hogwarts, the one that’s currently packed solid with bodies and dense with late-summer heat.

And it’s not as if we won’t see him anymore—in fact, he’s coming over for the party tonight at some point—but ever since he waved us off from his new front door and we came back here with some cheap bottles of white sweating through brown paper bags, straight out of the fridge from the local Co-op, Malfoy’s been in a funny mood. He’s been talking about Rohit ever since.

I flick a cork at him so it bounces off his forehead and he goes a bit cross-eyed trying to see what I’ve chucked at him. And it’s not that I want him to stop talking. Because he never used to talk to me at all, after we all started hanging out together a few years ago. He was rude and loud around everyone but me, and it used to drive me crazy. So now that we’re finally proper friends, and he spends most of his time being blithely rude and talking at me all the time, I don’t ever want him to stop. But I want him to stop talking about Rohit, that’s all. Listening to him going on and on in that slightly wistful, horribly fond tone of voice is giving me a weird feeling in my stomach. I realise, suddenly, that I don’t like to see Malfoy sad.

“You’re a prick, Potter,” he says, voice muddy from drink and dust, and he leans back on his elbows and aims an ineffectual kick at me. In the last long rays of the sun, his cropped hair gleams like something burnished, something armoured and strange. It’s not, though—under the fingers it feels sleek and warm and slippery, like the velvet of a puppy’s ears. I know because I’m the one who cut it all off for him, with the kitchen scissors and a sputtery old electric razor. 

He looks tired. 

“What’s up with you tonight, anyway?” I ask him, wondering if getting him to talk to me will chase away the dissatisfied curl of his mouth.

“Well,” he says, and then I hear the click of the lighter, and his feverish inhale, “I was wondering why everyone else always seems to move on, and I’m just… here. Waiting, I suppose? For what, I wonder?”

“I’m still here too,” I tell him, and he laughs through the haze of blossoming smoke.

“I wanted to give you these.” He wriggles, twists himself until he can wedge a hand into the back pocket of his jeans. When he opens his palm, it’s writhing with green. He has a handful of flowers, I realise, petals bruised and heat-limp and faded from the day.

I don’t know what to say.

He leans over to me, pulls my hand open and places it upcurled on his knee. 

“It’s Midsummer,” he says, like that should explain anything, and starts to sift through the flowers. “Rosebay willowherb. Dandelion. Dog rose. Enchanter’s nightshade.”

My hand twitches at the touch of stem and leaf, sepal and petal and stamen, as he drops them one by one into my waiting palm.

“Marsh marigold. Ragged robin. Forget-me-not. Seven flowers for the night that’s in it.”

I don’t know what he means, but I wrap my fingers around the stems and gather them together into a small tattered bouquet, and then I ask him what they’re for. (I don’t ask, _did you pick them specially? Did you go out today into the park across the road, or down by the canal, or into someone’s garden, and collect these, and think of me?_ )

“You put them under your pillow, Potter. It’s old magic. You said you were lonely, and I thought this might help.”

“Did I?” I ask uncertainly, not sure when I told him that small, sad truth—on which of the many nights we spent out here, talking drowsily for far too long, did he wrench that out of me? He has a way of doing that, of getting me to be outrageously honest with him without even noticing I’m doing it, maybe because he never keeps anything to himself anymore. That sort of unguarded openness is compelling, makes me lower my defences.

“If you sleep with them under your pillow, you’ll dream of your true love,” he says confidently, like this isn’t some old hedgerow tale, some futile romantic trickery for Muggles and fools. “It might help to know that they’re out there. If you do see whoever it is.”

I pocket the flowers carefully, and when I get home to my own little room, I peel them apart one by one and place them under my pillow, and I fall asleep almost straight away with the smell of crushed greenery in my nostrils.

I don’t dream of anything at all, but I wake in the quiet creeping grey before morning takes hold, and I’m sticky with sweat, and hard with some sort of angry wanting feeling. I touch myself tentatively, try to take it slow, but I come far too soon despite myself, eyes shut and body humming as I think of Malfoy, lying sun-gilded on the rooftop, with a slice of stomach on show and his hand in his back pocket.

* * *

# Draco

I’ve taken over Rohit’s old room, so it’s my flat now too, and I give Potter my spare key. Autumn is a cool damp thing that slides into winter without fanfare, and out on the roof I teach Potter some proper Warming Charms, and he teaches me how to cast Bluebell Flames, and we keep them in jamjars on our laps while we sit and smoke.

We throw a party for Diwali, and Rohit’s boyfriend gets his first taste of Weasley fireworks. The rooftop is a surging sea of light, and when we all pile out there we have to thread our way through the lines of lamps that flicker gently, guarded from the wind by my shielding charms. 

Potter sets the fireworks, and they fill the sky like neon rain, burning impossibly long and impossibly bright, and everyone cheers and oohs and aaahs. Even though I should be used to this sort of thing, I still love it. I always feel like there’s a fresh magic that comes with every bright burst of sparks. Potter stands next to me, elbows me and laughs when my mouth falls open on a gasp.

Eventually things wind down, the magic fizzes out, and the flames in the clay lamps start to gutter and dip and die. People leave, yawning, and Potter douses the last of the lights.

“You love fireworks,” he tells me, delightedly, and when I tell him that I never pretended not to, he nods and says “I have something for you.”

I’ve never been one for experimenting with potions, much less trying a Weasley invention that’s not past the testing stage, but Potter’s glee is infectious, and anyway I trust him.

We drink it at the same time—it crackles as it goes down, charcoal and acid pops and something that makes me sneeze—and we just have time to lie down together before it starts.

A conjured darkness blooms around us, and for a moment I feel cold and panicky and alone, until Potter’s hand finds mine and I remember that he’s scared of the dark, too. And then explosions of light begin behind my closed eyelids, colours blossoming until I can’t tell where the light ends and I begin. It’s like having fireworks in my brain.

Potter holds my hand until the lights fade, and I can feel the potion and the heat of his hand like sparks of electricity over my skin. When he finally speaks, it’s in a whisper, laughter bubbling under it.

“I think the darkness should have faded by now.”

“Fucking Weasleys,” I reply, and then he really does laugh, and we stumble up to standing and blindly manage to steer ourselves in the general right direction. Neither of us can see a bloody thing, and Potter’s _Finite_ doesn’t work, but he sends a fairly stern Patronus and he’s confident that Ron will come by to sort us out. We just have to wait, he says. Together, we feel our way along the wall until we reach the bathroom window, and I manage to heave myself up, though it’s weirdly difficult when I can’t see a thing. The space feels unfamiliar, and I manage to whack my head off the sash window as I wriggle through and drop to the bathroom floor. 

Behind me I can hear Potter struggling, swearing under his breath, and I turn to haul him in, but I misjudge the distance and smack him in the face, and he curses out loud at that, and then he overbalances and he falls off the windowsill and into me. I have an armful of Potter, and a faceful of his curls, and all I can smell is him—warm skin, and the bite of winter air, and fresh smoke. It sets _me_ off balance, this unexpected nearness, and I clutch at him—too hard—as we slide backwards and then I’m suddenly, painfully, lying in the bath with a tender ache at the back of my skull and Potter on top of me, closer than I’ve ever dreamed of having him.

“Malfoy?” he says worriedly. “Are you okay? Was that your head? It sounded painful.” 

As he speaks, I feel his hand touch my face, landing lightly and carefully, fingers curling tentatively over my cheek while he figures out where to touch me. His thumb brushes the swell of my lower lip, and he makes a small noise that I can’t quite decipher. I wish I could see his face. 

“Sorry,” he whispers, but he’s slow to move his hand away and I can’t help turning my face into the clasp of his palm, and then neither of us moves for a long moment. He’s so warm and solid where he rests against me, and I can feel the tremble in his arms with the effort of holding himself up. I move, just a minute shift of hips, and his shivers intensify. There’s a buzz of tension where my lips rest loosely against the firm pad of his palm. 

I’m braver in the dark for some reason, and because he’s so close I can feel exactly where to move as I slide my arms around his neck and pull him down fully. He doesn’t resist, just sinks down into the bracket of my arms. His nose is buried in my neck, and I can feel the rasp of his stubble along the column of my throat.

“Potter,” I say, but he doesn’t say anything back, just leans up a bit and kisses me. 

His mouth is hot and desperate on mine, and he tastes of sticky fruit and pistachio and coconut from all the sweets we ate out on the roof, and I can’t get enough of him. I tighten my arms around his neck, lock him into an embrace that’s more like a question, and he gives me the answer I need when he tugs at my lower lip with his teeth, and I feel him smile into my mouth at the first touch of my tongue to his. I can’t seem to keep quiet, and his fingers tighten in my hair with every desperate sound he wrenches out of me; when my fingers find his nipple through his t-shirt, he makes a contented-sounding murmur and arches into the touch.

We kiss for a long time, like we can’t get enough of each other, like we want to crawl into each other’s skin. I’ve almost forgotten that I can’t see; my whole body feels alight with sensation. He talks the whole time, in the same fond quiet voice he always uses when it’s just us, only this time he’s telling me where he wants to touch me, and where he wants my mouth, and wondering whether we can manage to fuck in this tiny bath. I scrabble at his skin, disoriented by pleasure and the nearness of him.

“I knew you’d be like this,” he says breathlessly, “I thought about it so many times,” and I manage to stop kissing him and I say, “What?” too loudly, so he laughs into the ridge of my collarbone.

“Did you ever think about me?” he asks, and I’m not sure how to tell him that he’s almost all I think about, has been since school, it’s only ever really been him. So I just nod.

“That was a yes, right?” he asks, and when I tell him aloud ( _yes, fucking yes_ ) he says “I think I can find your dick in the dark,” and reaches for the zipper of my jeans, pausing to cup me through the fabric with a hiss of something feral and wanting. 

At some point before he actually gets his hand on my cock, the bathroom door flies open, and then Ginny says “For fuck’s sake” in a tone that somehow manages to sound both disgusted and resigned, but then we hear the click of the door shutting again, and Potter keeps touching me, until I make him stop for long enough for us to get as naked as we can manage within the cool porcelain confines of the bath.

He says, “Malfoy,” quietly as he runs his hands over my ribcage, but I get him kneeling above me and find his slit with my tongue, and then it’s just a broken-sounding “Draco,” over and over until he comes in my mouth, suddenly and easily, like it’s the best thing he’s ever felt.

“Can I stay with you tonight?” he asks as his fist closes sure and tight around me, and he finds my mouth with his again. 

I tell him yes, and I know he hears me even if it’s muffled by his kisses, and then I fuck up into his fist and he coaxes my orgasm from me much quicker than I’d like, though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by that. I’ve always been far too easy for him.

He smiles at me then, and I realise that at some point the conjured darkness has dissipated, and I can see the delighted flash of those pretty eyes of his in the moonlight that spills through the open window. 

Everything seems very bright.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. [I'm on Tumblr!](https://tumblr.com/blog/tackytigerfic)
> 
> * * *
> 
> 💋 This work is part of the Taste of Smut Fest, a Harry Potter-centered fest dedicated to the five senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight. 
> 
> If you’ve enjoyed this work, please do shower our content creators with kudos and comments! 💌
> 
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